Rockport animator takes Pixar in new direction with Wall-E’

Wednesday

Writer-director-animator Andrew Stanton left his native Rockport, Mass., and headed west when he was 18, but he still carries a piece of home with him — in fact, it’s a piece of the Red Sox.

Writer-director-animator Andrew Stanton left his native Rockport, Mass., and headed west when he was 18, but he still carries a piece of home with him — in fact, it’s a piece of the Red Sox.

“After we won the 2004 championship, my dad found out that the sod at Fenway Park was going to be replaced, and the greens keeper was selling one-foot-by-one-foot squares,” says San Francisco-based Stanton. “He got in line, early in the morning, got a square, and then Fed Exed me half of it. Then I split half of that with another diehard Red Sox fan friend of mine. I put mine in my front lawn, and actually moved it with me when I moved to a new house. It’s still alive. We rub it for good luck, and it worked again.”

Stanton might be a big baseball fan, but he’s even crazier about animation, especially when there’s good storytelling to go along with it. He directed Pixar’s biggest moneymaker, “Finding Nemo,” and now he’s made a vastly different, but equally fascinating and entertaining kind of film, “Wall-E,” the futuristic story of a lonely robot who’s stuck trying to clean up an Earth that’s so flooded with garbage, all humans have left. The film also manages to feature a couple of songs from “Hello, Dolly!”

It’s a project that’s been kicking around in his head since a Pixar brainstorming session in 1994, even before the company’s groundbreaking film “Toy Story” was released.

“When we came up with this little character, it didn’t even have a name or a storyline,” recalls Stanton. “We just thought of a robot that’s left on a planet doing the same thing forever. And we knew that was such a cool, abstract idea that nobody would ever let us do it, because we hadn’t even proven ourselves with ‘Toy Story’ yet. So we didn’t try to pursue it. We just kind of put it on a shelf. After we’d done all these other films, and we were in the middle of ‘Nemo,’ suddenly I just couldn’t stop thinking about this little guy. It really was because ‘Nemo’ came out so successful that I thought, ‘All right, I want to believe that we have enough trust from the audience now that they would come see a movie like this.’ ”

He refers to it that way because it is indeed a bit offbeat, even for a Pixar production. The main characters are robots, and they don’t exactly speak, at least not with words. They communicate with a sort of R2D2 style of blips and bleeps. But the magic of the film is that anyone, of any age, will easily understand what they’re “saying.”

As if that weren’t enough, it’s also about a couple of robots, from different social circles, who fall for each other, and it prominently features a strong environmental message.

“Everybody always wonders, ‘Is it gonna be for kids, is it gonna be for adults, is it gonna exclude kids, exclude adults?’ ” says Stanton. “I get asked that on every movie I’ve worked on, and I’ve given the same answer every time. I said, ‘We don’t even think of the audience.’ I think we have all-ages tastes [at Pixar], and the best thing we could do is listen to the filmgoer in ourselves and make a movie that we wish we were seeing on the screen. That’s been the voice we’ve listened to for all the movies. And we’re not gonna change that.”

Stanton, 42, is kind of a big kid at heart, who says he can’t remember a time when he didn’t draw. Growing up in Rockport, in a small class of 70 kids, “I was the kid who could draw. But I never took it too seriously. I was much more seduced by music and acting and making movies with my friends.”

He laughs and adds, “I had this weird logic back then — I enjoyed acting too much, and never wanted it to disappoint me. So I chose to go with drawing because I thought I could whore myself for that.”

Sitting in his high school guidance counselor’s office one day, he noticed a bright fluorescent folder, and pulled it out. It was for the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, which was founded by Walt Disney, and had a school for animation.

“Once I realized there was a place that you could learn that, I was hooked,” he says. “And it was the best choice I ever made because animation kind of combined everything I liked. It deals with rhythm, with timing, with filmmaking, with drawing, with acting. So I felt like I didn’t have to put aside all these other things I was interested in.”

Asked if he did anything totally different on “Wall-E” than he did on “Finding Nemo,” Stanton says, “It’s more of I went deeper into trusting my gut. I was a little hesitant and tentative about my instincts on ‘Nemo.’ I never held back too much, but it was a huge undertaking. I was very happy with ‘Nemo,’ but I was very unconfident just when it was about to come out that the rest of the world wanted to see that movie or would like it as much as I did. But once I saw the response, it gave me a lot of confidence to think, ‘OK, I’m gonna listen to my gut even more, because I have some out-there ideas for “Wall-E.” So ‘Wall-E’ is more of an indulgence in my specific kind of taste in things.”

“Wall-E” opens nationally on June 27.

Ed Symkus can be reached at esymkus@cnc.com.

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